Equipment failure grounds flights in Memphis

Published Wednesday, September 26, 2007

MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- The Federal Aviation Administration shut down all airline traffic within 250 miles of Memphis for a few hours Tuesday, delaying and cancelling dozens of passenger and cargo flights around the country, because communications equipment had failed at the regional air-traffic control center there.

Air-traffic control centers in adjacent regions handled flights that were already in the air when the problem was discovered, FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said. "The airspace was completely cleared by 1:30 (p.m.) Eastern time," she said.

High-altitude flights through the region which includes parts of Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee were discontinued while the equipment was being fixed.

"What we did is put a ground stop in place for any flight that would transition through that airspace. We held them on the ground wherever they were, whether it was Miami, Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston," Bergen said.

The Air Route Traffic Control Center at Memphis began accepting flights again at 3 p.m. EDT and operations were back to normal a half-hour later, said Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the FAA in Washington.

The problem started when a major telephone line to the center went out at 12:35 a.m. EDT. That outage prevented the Memphis center from talking to flights in its airspace or to other air-traffic control facilities.